Things

Things is an attempt to approach the world without filling it up with preconceived ideas and purposes. An attempt to film things, without reducing them into mere means to build a story or statement. Things is on one hand a series of seemingly objective recordings without subject or superstructure, on the other hand it is Østbye’s most intimate and personal work, with no official theme or story to hide behind.

…Heidegger opens his essay, The Thing, with a sigh over how cinematography robs the world of the concept of distance and closeness and it contributes to the fact that everything is “all blended into a dull lack of any distance.” In contrast to this statement, the film, Things, by Thomas A. Østbye shows how faithful cinema can be to the Heidegger projection. Østbye reveals the “thingness” of things in a range between closeness and distance even more convincingly and more literally (even without the use of words) than it ever could be done using Heidegger’s own somewhat strange and difficult, cumbersome method of poetic expression(…) Lightly vibrating, almost completely static shots of animate and inanimate things in the broadest sense of the word – cup, tree, baby, rain, sculpture and others –each take turns, that last a couple minutes, on the screen. The combination of almost perfect stillness with a slight shake of a hand-held camera, allows one to see things represented at a sort of paradoxical proximity. Speaking again using a citation from Heidegger, they emerge “from a gentle vortex of a mirror game played by the world.”From